The topic of a return to a gold standard has been around ever since we left the gold standard. America left the gold standard to pursue empire. War is very expensive and can't be executed with a fixed-wealth economy. Wars, of any consequence, must be executed on credit.
The capitalist West had a stronger credit rating than the socialist U.S.S.R so, we competed until they went bust. http://www.professorfekete.com/artic...ntedToKnow.pdf

Foreigners hold $ 5.48 trillion of U.S. debt and $ 2.8 trillion needs to be rolled over in the coming year. The FED is on track to print $ 1.02 trillion in the coming year.
The debt ceiling is reached in about Feb. The paralysis of the fiscal cliff was predicted by economist Dick Eastman. Should we have an equal paralysis for the debt ceiling, GOV will default.

Pastor Lindsey Williams said that we were going to default in 2012. A few months ago, he related that there had been a change of plan and we would not default in 2012. It would take a lot of reading but, you would discover that pastor Williams has a history of very good accuracy.
A default would probably be structured as a Force majeure.
We would claim that we were broke and just were unable to pay. The general opinion is that this won't happen until Q2, 2013.

There are very credible claims that GOV has stashed away several hundred $ trillion.CAFR1 Home Page
Gary North claims that this is BS but, his arguments are worthless.
There have been numerous situations in GOV where they claimed to be broke but the local CAFR report showed tons of mostly hidden money.
A while back, the state of Wisconsin screamed that they were broke and had to do enormous layoffs. I went to the State website and clicked on the CAFR report. "Page not available" Check with your webmaster.

Keynesian economics demands unending growth in the supply of currency and credit. Americans are debt saturated and can no longer increase the quantity of new debt. The whole system depends on constant "money" growth. Where individuals have dropped out, GOV has taken up the quest.
Keynesian economics can not survive deflation.

When the Japanese RE bubble burst, commercial RE in Tokyo lost 99% of value. Residential RE only lost 90%. The stock market crashed, etc.
Nothing worked and prices kept dropping. GOV tried enormous infrastructure projects. Just temporary.
Shinzo Abe, the new prime minister said that he is going to print with wild abandon. Politicians try proven bad ideas when they run out of good ideas.
The Japanese put all their savings in the GOV postal bank. Those savings are gone. They were given to the bankers. Japan has to roll over $ 3 trillion dollars worth of yen bonds.

On average a barrel of oil is sold 41 times before it is consumed. The speculators add about $ 26 to every barrel. This is where the upper-loop money bleeds over to the lower loop. Aggregate consumption in America is declining as speculators are scrambling for "return."
Fresh-ink money bleeds into the producing economy and inflates prices.
Since the consumer is cutting back, price hikes in necessities reduces money available for discretionary spending.

The CB is trying to stop deflation by letting free money from the upper loop infuse into the lower loop. The very predictable outcome is that consumption goes even lower as spending concentrates just in necessities.
Reagan formed the Plunge Protection Team to pump $ trillions of cash directly into the markets.Working Group on Financial Markets - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The currency has been inflated but, there is no increase in wealth.

10,000 people a day sign up for SS benefits for the next 19 years. Medicare is growing even faster. GOV wants to cut it's liabilities. Unfunded liabilities grow at over $ 7 trillion a year. GOV will eventually let it all crash and then pick up the pieces. It just won't pick up very many of them.
The FED is printing wet-ink money to keep GOV going. That plan has never worked in the long run. There is always talk about things crashing.Ex-Feds & Wall Street Execs Are Going Into Hiding-Why? &#124; Dave Hodges – The Common Sense Show

The derivatives market will eventually blow. That will take down the banks.
That will bring massive deflation. There is a lot of talk about hyperinflation.
GOV is printing a LOT of money but, any big crash will take out most of the financial system. It will be hard to get all that electronic money into circulation. Americans spend 10% of their money on food. If everyone cuts back to basic survival goods, it will be close to impossible to cause hyperinflation. This is especially true when most other economies will crash too. ALL those paper assets will just evaporate.

Boris Yeltsin said it very clearly; Russia is controlled by organized crime. This is also true to a great degree for israel.
America is where organized crime is most thoroughly entrenched. Companies like Brown-Ferris industries are completely built with Mob money. Organized crime manufactured the savings&loan crash. That netted them a cool $ 1 trillion but 1,000 people went to jail.

Jim Willie has been writing for many years. He exposes a lot of corruption. His latest article shows very well how the rest-of-the-world is shunning the dollar.The Coming Isolation of USDollar
This article covers a lot of ground. Jim's track record is VERY good.

Japan is in serious trouble. Japan may be the spark that lights the powder keg. The other likely candidate is the derivative market.
"The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage."Say Goodbye To The Good Life

The fact is that once the ball gets rolling, there will be NOTHING left standing.

The center of all this corruption and crime is in Langley Virginia. Even Ron Paul came out and said that the CIA was purely criminal. Since organized crime has a lock on the justice department, nobody (BIG) has to worry about going to jail. America is run by the "syndicate" and they are desperate. They are going to run it into the ground.
In their effort to steal everything, they will eventually destroy ALL paper assets. At the end of the day the currency and bond market depends on trust.

Jim Willie points out that the dollar is being shunned by the R.O.W.
Think about what that means when America tries to roll over $ 2.8 trillion in bonds in the coming year.

Most of you already know about the collapse in Argentina. Adrian Salbuchi is an economist and prolific writer from Buenos Aires. He has lots of vids and articles. Argentine was looted as a practice for bigger countries.The Coming World Government by Adrian Salbuchi
Adrian frequently talks about a new-world-order. So does everyone else. Truth is, everybody has a different idea of how this order is going to be "Ordered".

If you read the article from Jim Willie, you can see that Asia wants NOTHING to do with the West. The West screwed the East big time with the Asian Currency crisis.
America is the bastard child of the declining British empire. The same empire who used India as a greenhouse to grow opium and enslave China. The Chinese emperor begged the British Crown to cease and desist. Then, they fought the Opium Wars to ensure the continued trade.
The British used the Lanteen sail and the Chinese used the square sail,,, so, the British always won.
You can bet that the Chinese haven't forgotten any of this.

This is a very good vid that lays it all out from the initial setup to the final screwjob.DOCUMENTAL INSIDE JOB on Vimeo
The bankers do it over and over. Since all the laws are tossed in the trash,,,, they rob everybody without breaking any laws.

The criminals have been marvelously successful and have no inclination to stop. Though they have started to notice that "pickings" are getting a bit slim. The criminals/bankers instituted zero % interest so that people would lose part of their savings to price inflation. This motivates people to take their money out of safe investments that pay NO interest and put the money into risky investments,,,, where the bankers can steal it.

America will soon get austerity so that the money can be squeezed out for the bankers.

The Bank for international settlements and the 8 families;
"BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist fascism. It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the 1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s economy. It served as conduit for Illuminati funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg’s J. Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam. Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir of global drug money laundering. "Swiss Bankers, BIS & The House Of Rockefeller « LEFT HOOK by Dean Henderson

Thank you Danny B , the Tulip Mania event is one of the most fascinating economic event ..... as it highlights quite well the "mania" behavior of any economic market ..... thank you again for bringing it up

"As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."
Benjamin Disraeli
We live in the information age. It is more difficult to create bubbles today.
Look at the Facebook IPO.
A century ago, it was easy to induce people to voluntarily give you their money for a scheme. It's a bit more difficult today. The Dotcom bubble showed that it is still possible.
The Federal GOV does NOT provide a prospectus for GOV bonds. They also do NOT use GAPP accounting standards. That is why FED GOV debt rises about $ 7 trillion a year and is not reported.
Big, Bad, Bald,Ben Bernanke prints gazillions of FRNs to buy GOV debt. This drives down the interest rate. Should interest rates rise by a few points, it would be game over. That was the point of forcing the LIBOR rate down.
If LIBOR was allowed to rise, investment would flow OUT of GOV bonds and interest cost would rise.

"As I noted the other day, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 2.534 percent at the end of November. If that number just rose to where it was about a decade earlier we would be in a massive amount of trouble.

Back in the year 2000, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 6.638 percent. If we were at that level today, the U.S. government would be paying out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt."Say Goodbye To The Good Life

The FED prints to keep interest rates low.
Printing raises price inflation
Investors demand higher interest rates to compensate for price inflation.
Austerity tends to counter price inflation BUT, it slows down the economy.
The now-slower economy is less able to pay off the debt.
The less that the debt is payed off, the higher the interest cost rises.
The GDP-to-debt ratio goes even higher.

Did you know that some of the most consistently good stock traders don't read finance articles? They can't even read company accounts or speak English.

Quote:

To give you an example, back in 1993 the Swedish newspaper Expressen, tested the trading abilities of a monkey called Ola. They ran a competition over a period of a month with him pitted against one of the top professional traders.

As the pro, carefully picked his stocks and set limit orders to squeeze the last krona out of his trades, Ola picked up some darts and threw them into a copy of the newspaper. The editorial staff then dutifully executed Ola's trades. Guess who ended up with the most money at the end of the month?

It turns out that one of humanity's oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up.

According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received. Though primates have been observed trading grooming for food sharing or infant care, this is the first time this kind of exchange has been observed between male and female primates in a sexual context, says lead researcher Michael Gumert of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, demonstrating that the amount of time a male macaque "will invest in [its] partner" depends largely on how many options it has around.

Monsieur M. The article said that the females upped their sexual activity to 3.5 times an hour. Those males must be pretty stout fellas to keep up with that.

As each new country passes into the industrial revolution, it's productive capacity grows enormously. This adds to the total global-production capacity.

After WW II, America had 3% of the world's population and 50 % of the manufacturing capacity. We built up a great standard of living. By about 1970, the ROW,,,Rest of the world had rebuilt their own manufacturing capacity. Europe and Japan managed to keep a wage standard close to America. Just the same, America lost part of market share. This caused wages to stagnate.

In an effort to reclaim part of our lost market share, America went off the gold standard.

This allowed a big increase in money printing. The resulting internal inflation was in reality, a wage cut.

The money-printing continued unabated. This was seen as higher prices rather than as a wage reduction.

Fast-forward about 20 years and there was even more competition from newer producer countries. This necessitated even more money printing to lower wages and maintain market share. This was only implemented to a certain point. To maintain our standard of living in the face of ever-increasing competition from low-wage producers, we borrowed our way to prosperity. We borrowed 80% of savings worldwide.

Our standard of living should have reverted close to a global mean. We borrowed to keep the party going.

A few more years down the road and we hit an enormous roadblock.
The perfection of containerized shipping threw ALL of our manufacturing into international competition. The Indians and Chinese moved UP to [ $15] a day. Americans and Westerners in general could never survive at that rate.

As billions of new people moved into manufacturing, global productive capacity grew enormously. As global wages fell towards a mean average Western consumptive power declined considerably. Our current, Western wage-and-cost structure can not be compatible with $15 a day wages. We stupidly bought Chinese stuff, not even thinking that we pushed ourselves out of jobs.

Our current financial system can NOT work unless there is a growing credit and money supply. With wages and trade shrinking, the bankers had to extend credit always farther out. We constantly dipped into future-earnings to pay for our lifestyle today. We lived on money that we HOPED to earn. This, at the same time that we sent our money and jobs out of the country.

GOV continues to print more money,,, to lower wages,,, to keep market share. This is referred to as a "race to the bottom". Every step of the race, they lower wages and wipe out consumptive power. It's like racing barefoot through a field of broken glass.

The people who are tossed out of the job market are the collateral damage from the race.

All countries are printing in unison because nobody wants to be priced out of the labor / manufacturing market. High unemployment will be ever-increasing.

The poverty level is going way up. As we morph nearer to a global mean wage, the cost-and-price structure in America will fall apart. There is plenty of blame and stupidity to go around. But, at the same time, A lot of this is due to market forces.

The West has been great at producing lots of money but, very little wealth. Credit and money grew at 6 times the rate that GDP grew. Like an over-stretched rubber bank, it's all going to snap back.

The reason that I focus on manufacturing is because it is of primary importance as one of only 3 main enterprises that add value. Mining, Farming and Manufacturing are all value-added enterprises. The rest just shuffle around the money.

If you look at a graph of lost industries and a graph of money printing, there is a clear correlation. The West can't very well operate with Eastern wages so, we print. We print to reduce wages and keep market share. Then we borrow to maintain our standard of living.

Printing to reduce wages is not something that CBs talk about. They say that they are "going to stimulate the economy". They never get around to explaining how they can cause spending in a society that is debt-saturated.
Helicopter Ben said that he could drop money from a helicopter. He forgot to mention that these money drops would only go to his friends.
0% for his friends and 4--5% for the consumer. He's trying to inflate away the debt. Someone forgot to tell him that inflation is mostly driven by wages; Inflation Isn't About The Price Of Corn. It's About Wages. : Planet Money : NPR
Aggregate employment is falling. Wages are falling. Money velocity is falling.
We have inflation in a few areas like food and energy. But, with aggregate income falling, people keep buying essentials and cut out more and more discretionary spending. Any price inflation in essentials results in decreased spending for non-essentials. Even energy consumption is falling.

The CBs have finally started to notice that increased printing isn't helping.
Jobs and wages are the key, NOT money. The Central Bankers are a bunch of IDIOTS.
They drive down bonds and think that people will stay in the market.
They drive up stocks that have no P/E and think that people will stay in stocks.
They have ZIRP and a printing press. That's like giving a teenager an axe and a flamethrower.

The CBs drive down wages to keep market share. With lower wages, consumption and the economy slow down.

ALL this "money" and credit that is floating around can be compared to Voldemort's ghost. Voldemort was looking for some "vessel" to give him tangible reality. He circled the globe like all the paper wealth looking for something to give him substance. There are reportedly 10 quadrillion worth of contracts denominated just in DOLLARS.
Banks print to save their currencies but, all that printing endangers these same currencies.

This is a paper by Martin Armstrong. I believe that he wrote it while still in prison. You probably have to read it 2 or 3 times to take it all in. It's very hard to step back and look at man and his constructs. This paper does a pretty good job.*Collapse of Capitalism

This is a paper by Martin Armstrong. I believe that he wrote it while still in prison. You probably have to read it 2 or 3 times to take it all in. It's very hard to step back and look at man and his constructs. This paper does a pretty good job.*Collapse of Capitalism

thank you for this enlightening paper

it seems wherever we look and find some shenanigans going down .... we seem to find England ( not its people ) has a root ( direct or indirect ) in it

It also allowed England to boost food production. There was no scheme too foul for the English to implement. They purposely starved the Irish. They maintained the population of India at 220 million for a full century by means of rotating famines.
They drug America into World wars. They were losing market-share to Germany and Japan. The list goes on and on,,, crimes against humanity.

Almost all industries have automated and slimmed down. The productivity-per-person has gone way up.
This is not at all true for banking and GOV.
CITI has 155,000 employees worldwide. All they truly are is an information service.
In "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", John Perkins states that most countries have far too many banks, all controlled by a few families. There is always strife when the families learn that somebody is going to lose their banks.TalkingStickTV - John Perkins - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - Part I - YouTube

So far, the banks have been able to rob everybody to keep themselves going. Some people have started to see the writing on the wall.
"Bank of England’s Chief of Financial Stability: Internet Technology Will Break Up Big Bank Monopoly"

Islamic banking is forbidden to charge interest. The 2 biggest centers of Islamic banking WERE Tunis and Cairo. Both centers were destroyed by the George Soros led Arab Spring.
ALL of America's recent wars were against countries that had an independent central bank. ALL of them lost their gold after they were invaded. Libya had to be destroyed because their "Manmade River" project threatened to feed North Africa. That couldn't be allowed. We always have to have a threat to hang over their heads.

This is what Howard Buffet had to say about gold; (Warren Buffet's father).
"I warn you that politicians of both parties will oppose the restoration of gold, although they may outwardly seemingly favor it, unless you are willing to surrender your children and your country to galloping inflation, war and slavery then this cause demands your support. For if human liberty is to survive in America, we must win the battle to restore honest money. There is no more important challenge facing us than this issue -- the restoration of your freedom to secure gold in exchange for the fruits of your labors."

"[W]hen you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty..."

Alan Greenspan had this to say;
"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense — perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire — that gold and economic freedom are inseparable,"Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom (1966)

This time is NOT different,,, except for the magnitude;Eight hundred years of financial folly | vox
Considering the past history of the British empire, it wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that the money powers keep us impoverished to keep our numbers down.

Farmhand, thanks much for the kudos.
In the spring of '05, I got the last of my stuff together and moved from L.A. to Bend, Oregon. I had built a log house there to move into eventually. I left it empty for 15 years and was happy to finally move.
I spent the summer just riding my bike, swimming, lying in the sun and taking if easy. I just happened to run into sites from the gold bugs.

like everything you read, you have to decide if it is valid or not. The things written about the real estate bubble were very convincing. I read a LOT more and decided that I had better get some money together. I was completely convinced where everyone that I talked to thought "maybe".
I stocked up supplies in Bend even though I had moved back to L.A.

I expected the banks to crash in '07. When that didn't happen, I knew that it would be postponed for a while. That gave me more time to prepare but, it also meant that the final climax would be worse. The longer it was postponed, the more worried I became. I finally bought some farmland because Bend, Or has a non-existent growing season.

I had grand plans for the new place near coastal Oregon but, The State completely shut me down. I was going to set things up to where I could help a lot of people. Didn't happen.
I just kept reading and trying to save a few bucks.

If you study the response to the storms Katrina and Sandy, you see that people were given plenty of warning. Those who took the initiative to look out for themselves had a much better chance of survival,,,, GOV gave them warning.
Those who expected someone else to look out for them didn't do so well.
I suspect that this will be a pattern for the future.
There are 10,000 people a day signing up for social-security for the next 19 years. I suspect that the corporatocracy wants to cut it's non-performing assets.
They are also working on reducing the number of people with weak immune systems.Ted Gunderson - Obama FBI CIA Stop The Death Dumps Now - Chemtrails - YouTube
That should cut down on overhead expenses.

BTW, I went to OZ several years ago and did a coach-camping tour.
Melbourne--- far North Queensland---Darwin---Red Center and back to Melbourne. Yes, I saw it raining on the Rock.ULURU (Ayers Rock) Australia ~ "Raining On The Rock" - YouTube
No, I don't want to see any more gum trees or termite mounds.
Mt. Isa,,, Oodnadata track,,, Heartbreak Hotel,,, Mataranka hot springs, Surfer's Paradise,,,, Simpson desert,,,sailed the great barrier reef.
I even bought a bottle of XXXX beer for a horse.

Man started out with Family, clan and tribe. About 350 years ago, the Nation State was "invented". This idea attempted to "stretch" the cooperation of the clan to encompass an entire nation state. The powers-that-be wanted more centralization and power. It hasn't been a good fit in some places. Yugoslavia comes to mind.

There has been ongoing consolidation ever since then. The State created enemies to hold together unions that were unnecessary and un-natural.
The State used constant warfare to keep populations down. Religion was a good tool also to get people to kill others who were not their enemy.

"War is the health of the state," the radical writer Randolph Bourne said"War is the health of the state
Keep in mind that this was the modus operandi BEFORE birth control.
Everybody was fighting for living space.

Truth is, the Nation-State is generally evil. It's just a bigger form of control mechanisms. The state is aware of this and must constantly provoke or invent new enemies to justify it's continuing existence. The State wants NO end to war.
Without a common enemy, the nation state would lose any reason for existence. GOV is quite clear at admitting this.http://www.teachpeace.com/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf

Shumpeter came up with the idea that war is great for the economy because it destroys goods that must be replaced.Joseph Schumpeter, "Creative Destruction"
The parasites can only suck off wealth if WE continue to create it. Should the producers reach a point where they were all generally satisfied with their state in life, they wouldn't go to work every day. The fruits of our labor must be destroyed to keep us hungry and producing.

We should take the bus and / or drive a Prius to conserve oil. The U.S. military is the greatest user of petroleum in the world.
Imagine if the whole country lived like the Amish. NO money for the bankers.
We need ever-bigger wars to Grow the economy. But, GOV preaches conservation.... just for us.

After WW II, the Allies threw a harness onto the defeated, Japan and Germany, and had them work their tails of to produce for us. It was a very sweet arrangement because they invested their profits into U.S. treasury bonds.

Consolidation and control is the never-ending quest of the powers that be.
The destruction of the banks and the nation-state are what we really need.
America needs to revert back to a loose confederation of states.
The downfall of America began with the constitution. The Articles of Confederation were ALL that we needed. The money powers wanted to start building an empire that would be a vassal to England and London bankers.
Thomas Jefferson was sent off to France so that he couldn't stop the constitution.One of the most intriguing might-have-beens in American History : The Colonial Williamsburg Official History Site
It's all about controlling the slaves.

I suppose that I should do more to explain my opinion of the Constitution.

"his Constitution provided for the substitution of a popularly elected parliament and president for an unelected king, but it changed nothing regarding their power to tax and legislate. To the contrary, while the English king's power to tax without consent had only been assumed rather than explicitly granted and was thus in dispute,[8] the Constitution explicitly granted this very power to Congress. Furthermore, while kings — in theory, even absolute kings — had not been considered the makers but only the interpreters and executors of preexisting and immutable law, i.e., as judges rather than legislators,[9] the Constitution explicitly vested Congress with the power of legislating, and the president and the Supreme Court with the powers of executing and interpreting such legislated law.[10]

In effect, what the American Constitution did was only this: Instead of a king who regarded colonial America as his private property and the colonists as his tenants, the Constitution put temporary and interchangeable caretakers in charge of the country's monopoly of justice and protection."

ALL systems are competitive except those who can create a monopoly.
GOV is the primary monopoly and has a (mostly) monopoly on force. They would like to have a complete monopoly but, Americans are in no hurry to give up their guns. We don't even claim that guns are exclusively for hunting. We tell GOV that are guns are to be turned on them if the situation warrants.Suzanna Gratia Hupp explains meaning of 2nd Amendment! - YouTube

The West has spent the last 150 years inventing labor-saving devices and, at the same time,,, trying to keep full employment. Since the private, non-monopoly sector is competitive, it cuts employment rolls as it becomes more efficient.

Since GOV promises to take care of everybody, it must specialize in inefficiency. That's why it must remain a monopoly.

GOV erases 50% of the burden of it's debts by inflating the currency supply.
It has to get this currency into circulation to get the required price inflation from the currency inflation. GOV tries to get equal parts of inflation in both prices and wages. This worked pretty well until the 70s. Because of global competition, GOV was not able to increase wages,,, only commodities.
We got stagflation.

Since we have an increasing exposure to global competition from low-wage producers, GOV can't seem to cause a wage-price spiral. Wages have been flat since about 1970. The one area where GOV can affect wages is in the public sector. At the federal level, GOV overpays millions of lawyers and bureaucrats. America has 4% of the world's population and 50% of the world's lawyers.
51% of Americans rely on a check from GOV. Everyone from welfare people to defense contractors. Those not in the loop are losing ground. Currently, 35% of the income in America is from transfer payments like SS and welfare.
GOV pushes the money into the economy any way it can.

It pushes enormous amounts to the states too. Consider this;

In the state of New Jersey, it costs $ 1,102,235 dollars every year to maintain ONE MILE of 2 lane state highway.
In California, it costs $ 989,472 for every mile of highway.
$440,675 of this is just for administration costs. That is for every mile of 2 lane highway.
In Arkansas, it costs $ 36,489 to maintain one mile of 2 lane state highway.
Yep, the states get federal highway funds.

GOV is able to pump lots of money into the system. BUT, once you start down the credit highway, you have to increase the pile of credit NONSTOP.
That is why GOV is throwing money at wars and boondoggles.
One of the cardinal rules of lending is that you never lend money to be used for basic consumption. GOV is borrowing and printing to pass out money for consumption.

The situation in Europe is somewhat different. The Eurozone bureaucracy was an "overlay" on top of the bloated state bureaucracy. It reduced the GDP of the member countries by 20%. It also made a lot of bureaucrats happy.

In it's efforts to inflate away the debt, increase it's size and pay off as many people as possible, GOV pumps currency into mostly NON-PRODUCTIVE sectors.
Because of regulatory-capture, the non-productive sectors of banks and GOV are awash in capital. The producing sector is starving for capital. The consumer is starving for consumptive power. GOV is busily printing bonds that can only be repaid by taxes from the (almost defunct) productive sector. GOV/banks are starving the goose that lays the golden eggs.

This is an article about the period of time that America was on the gold standard. The dollar was 42% gold backed but, this proved to be adequate.
This ended in 1914 because the PTB needed a flexible currency to get WW I rolling.http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-...r=Nathan+Lewis

This is a good article talking about all the various leeches who attach themselves to GOV in order to collect a paycheck that they don't deserve.
All the various functionaries, bureaucrats and court-jesters.Zombie Nation

Automation and low-wage competition have wiped out the job market.
GOV is printing like crazy to keep the economy going. War and war industries are the only thing that is "selling" right now. So, WAR it will be.

There is lots of talk about inflation and hyperinflation. The economy is actually in deflation. The amount printed by the FED is far less that the notional amount that people lost in the previous crash.
The problem at the moment is that the world is shunning the dollar.
After 1944, the dollar was the reserve currency.
After the Korean war, the war-profiteers and the empire builders fired up a war in Viet-Nam. The over-printing that was required to make war destroyed the value of the dollar.

Various countries shunned the dollar.
Since the dollar was no longer a gold currency, Kissinger managed to make it the next best thing. He tied it to oil. All oil had to be purchased with U.S. dollars. This extended the life of the dollar onward from 1971.
Once again, various countries are shunning the dollar. China has set itself up as the oil broker for the world. Most other countries have joined some kind of trade union to get away from dollar trade.

At some point the R.O.W. will reject U.S. dollars and America will be forced to use a gold backed currency. The probable outcome is that America will use a gold-backed dollar for foreign trade and a domestic fiat dollar at home. Adrian Salbuchi already wrote about the likelihood of this.
There is much talk about gold confiscation. If GOV can print endless quantities of the domestic currency to buy gold, it doesn't make sense to confiscate gold.
You can bet that there will be laws against exporting gold.

Academia refuses to teach about money. They prefer to leave everybody ignorant. I'll start with the basics.
Rule # 1 to remember;ALL MONEY STAYS IN THE BANK
A bank does NOT loan out savings. It conjures the money from YOUR signature.
On a good day, A bank conjures $ 10,000 and you pay it back?? with interest.
You're repaying them for a loan of money they never had. This is pretty straightforward to understand.

Suppose that I have 6 fish and you have none. You want to feed your family but the weather is too bad to go out and fish. You need the fish NOW. You want to eat NOW. I give you 3 of my fish on your promise to repay me 4 fish later. I give up on selling or eating me other 3 fish.
I merit the 4th fish because I renounced the profit or nourishment on my original 3. You desperately need my 3 fish. You need them NOW.

This is referred to as a Time Preference I merit the interest because of the time factor. Simple barter rarely involves a time preference. There is no interest. Deferred consumption or deferred profit merits interest.

Back to the banker. He "loans" you money that never existed. It was created by your promise to pay. There is NO time preference on this money.
He did NOT take someone's savings and loan it to you.
This money that he loaned to you at compound interest does NOT carry a time preference. There is no fiscal justification for an interest charge.

There is no real risk factor because the loan is secured by the tangible property that you pledge. As long as the appraisal is correct, the bank can't justify an interest charge to offset possible risk.
A loan from savings could justify an interest charge because of the time preference. A loan from a bank can not justify anything more than a filing fee.

Peer-to-peer lending and crowd-funding use actual savings to fund projects.
Islamic banking is forbidden to charge interest (riba). The bank goes partner with you. They provide the funds and business expertise. You provide ideas and work. You split the profits.
With Islamic banking, the bank is motivated to see you succeed. With Western banking, they are motivated by greed. If you pay off the loan, they gain from the interest. If you fail, they foreclose on the tangible property that secured the loan. They have more to gain when you fail.

You could take out as home loan for $ 100,000 for 30 years. You could pay off about $ 305,000 over a 29 1/2 year period and then go broke. The bank gets your $ 305,000 and they get the home too.

The sub-prime crisis was a push towards socialism.
GOV forced banks to loan to un-qualified people.
This drove the home price way up.
The formation of the sub-prime loans was a guarantee of default.
The forced price inflation was a guarantee of more default.
GOV bought all the loans from the banks.
GOV now owns the mortgages 97% of All U.S. Mortgages are Backed by the Government | Zero Hedge
This was the desired result where GOV owns all the housing.
It's easy when you own a printing press

Our economic system is completely dependent on our political system.
If the management is corrupt, the system is corrupt.
The financial powers that run the country have gradually taken over and given us their version of "Brave new world".

"The ruling oligarchs correctly chose the painless, amusement saturated, soft totalitarianism of Huxley’s Brave New World over the fearful, pain inflicting, surveillance state, house of horrors detailed in Orwell’s 1984."

"There is too little cash, too few jobs, too much debt, too many takers, too few makers, too many bankers, too much delusion, and too few resources to sustain the unsustainable. We have entered the end stages of a ravenous locust swarm. The fields have been stripped barren."

"When the men in smoke filled rooms realized their soft totalitarianism was losing its grip on the oblivious, submissive, egoistical, distracted masses, they began phase two of their effort to retain their wealth, power and control. They began to institute Orwellian measures to strike fear into the populace. Their illusion of control is dissipating and they are resorting to force in order to maintain hegemony."

That is where we now find ourselves. "Brave new world" has run it's course.
"1984" is the new operating system.The Burning Platform

The financial wizards have been piling on leverage on top of leverage in financial instruments. They keep inventing new words to describe the towering, wobbly constructs. CDO squared and re-hypothecation are two of the new creatures. They have tried to do the same with gold and silver.
It's not working so well because gold-bugs catch on too fast.

Gold is supposed to be sold like commodities, NOT like financial instruments.
One of the bullion banks, CME Group admitted at a CFTC hearing that they sell every ounce of gold 100 times.
Since "everybody" doesn't go to the bank and take out all their money, the bullion banks just assumed that "everybody" wouldn't come and take all their gold. It's not working out that way.

"Royal Mint of Canada sold in 2008,,,, over $1 billion worth of gold."
Today, they have a total of $ 100 million on hand. They are the only bullion bank in Canada. They aren't alone in gold ripoffs.
"class action lawsuit filed against Morgan Stanley, which was settled out of court, in which it was alleged that Morgan Stanley told clients it was selling
them precious metals that they would own in full and that the company
would store, yet even despite charging storage fees was not in actual possession of the bullion."The Latest Gold Fraud Bombshell: Canada&#039;s Only Bullion Bank Gold Vault Is Practically Empty | Zero Hedge

Bankers and the state HATE gold because it forces discipline. The London Gold Pool was formed years ago to suppress the price of gold. It failed when everybody took their gold away.
There has been a second gold "Pool" formed and it too is failing because people are taking delivery of the gold,,, rather than trusting the banks.Guest Post: The Failure of the Second London Gold Pool | Zero Hedge

The question of gold confiscation is always in the background. It wouldn't seem likely because GOV can just print currency to buy up the gold.
The gold that the U.S. claims to have on hand is valued at $42.42 an ounce. GOV could easily force people to sell their gold to GOV. GOV could set the price where they want it. They could also outlaw the export of gold. It wouldn't be a big surprise if GOV mandated that everyone sell their gold to GOV for??? $ 100 an ounce. http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-...+Phillips&mk=1

It wouldn't be difficult to install gold/metal detectors in every airport and dock. The best detectors can discriminate and detect from 300 ft. away.
Logan airport already has cash-sniffing dogs.

The central banks tried to completely rid the financial system of gold. They referred to it as a "barbaric relic". Big, Bad, Bald, Ben Bernanke said that America holds on to gold just out of tradition.
The CBs sold off all the gold trying to expunge it from the financial system.
This didn't work and now several are trying to buy it back.
The bullion banks sold every ounce of gold 100 times. Now that people are taking delivery, they are going to run out of gold. This will cause catastrophic losses to 99% of the people who think that they own gold.
This could cause enough of a ripple to crash the system.

The CBs refer to gold as a barbaric relic. The central bank to the central bankers does ALL account settlements in GOLD. The BIS settles all accounts in gold,,, only. This gives you an idea of the actual value that is assigned to gold.
A crash in the precious metals market could bring down the whole system.

Academia refuses to teach about money. They prefer to leave everybody ignorant. I'll start with the basics.

Peer-to-peer lending and crowd-funding use actual savings to fund projects.
Islamic banking is forbidden to charge interest (riba). The bank goes partner with you. They provide the funds and business expertise. You provide ideas and work. You split the profits.
With Islamic banking, the bank is motivated to see you succeed. With Western banking, they are motivated by greed. If you pay off the loan, they gain from the interest. If you fail, they foreclose on the tangible property that secured the loan. They have more to gain when you fail.

you know if you dig a bit deeper , you'll find out that the islamic bank is the remnant of a banking system that existed before the rise of Islam ... and today .... why do you think all the effort is made to tarnish the word Islam .... the subconscious of a nation is a fine tool for The Power that were

Quote:

“Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.”

J. Edgar Hoover

on a side note :

Quote:

The bank goes partner with you. They provide the funds and business expertise.

the impact of such a policy ...... proximity + job creation + growth of a real productive economy .... as it motivates the bank to help more small businesses rather than just large dinosaur like corporations ..... simple logic no one wants to put all their eggs in the same basket

the irony is that people created the concept of Bank .... today the bank thinks it can do without the People .... typical attitude of tyrants ..... they have learned nothing from history

Monsieur M, you make a good point.
The main value-added industries are Manufacturing, agriculture and mining.
Look closely and you'll see one thing in common. They are all "productive".
Now, look at China, India, Brazil and several other emerging countries.
Their economies are centered around EXPORT and not domestic consumption.
That means that there are several hundred million newly employed people producing for the export market. (The West)

There are several hundred million wanna-be consumers in the West who are no longer employed producers.
Worldwide productive capacity is going way up. Western consumption is going way down. Investors and industrialists have take note of this.
They refuse to invest in growth when the consumer has lost purchasing power.Rosenberg: Core CapEx Orders Signal Recession - Business Insider

Seems the bankers have forgotten that all productivity is for the sake of consumption.

There are varying figures but;
It is generally agreed that finance is responsible for 49% of the cost of the average item.
That is 19% for trash collection and 78% for public housing. Average 49%
So, finance charges cause a 100% markup.
Taxes add a heavy burden also.
So, for some other country to compete in our markets, they just need to keep the bankers under control.

The original purpose of banks was to facilitate the productive economy.
Today, the banks control and destroy the productive economy.

The CAPEX index shows $ 2 trillion sitting on the sidelines. The bankers are going into overdrive to project happy thoughts to get this money to where they can steal it. Draghi is being deified as the super hero who saved the Eurozone. He did alright,,, he saved the rich.
He told the poor that they were out of luck;Mario Draghi has saved the rich, now he must save the poor - Telegraph

""Professor Barron has put forward the idea that the only route out of the ongoing euro crisis for Germany is an initial return to the Deutschmark, followed preferably by a subsequent move to a golden Deutschmark." "Patrick Barron on the eurozoneâ€™s future